The Fans Football Blog3

How can we make this draw profitable?
Answer: learning our lesson.

How is that?
Answer: Being critical and objective analyzing this game away of typical statements and general phrases.

Let’s first clarify three points as needed for this article to be taken as objective as it was planned to be:

1) I am not a result oriented guy, as some may remember I defended the team when we lost against Numancia, and felt good when we drew against Basel, so this article would have been exactly the same no matter what the result would have been, if we scored a last minute goal for example.

2) By no mean we consider that draw as the end of the world, its just one of the unimpressive results we will earn during the league, prepare yourself for more, or else its going to be a boring season for me. So here we don't sentence our players to death if we don't win, the same as we don't crown them as gods when we smash an opponent. This is only a brief of what I believe Pep and Co will do after the game, a "critical analysis" to learn the lessons.

We can jump to conclusions like, this player is bad that player is perfect, then we change our mind after the next game based on performance, or we focus on what these players were brought to apply, the tactical system planned by the coaches. I will keep my over-all evaluation regarding players and coaching staff till January as I always said, for now, lets try to understand why we failed to win this game.

3) It will sound easy and unfair of me to come and lecture about the game after it ended, I am aware of that, so I will base my evaluation mostly based on what I wrote before the game to keep things fair for all the parties.

Just a flashing remark, after I read the comments every where about the players performance, keep in mind that cams fool us sometimes, it follows the ball in a way that the players outside the ball frame will be anonymous even though their roles may be more important than the most seen, example?

How many times did Getafe players moved the ball from defense to offense throw our left flank? Count and if I count right then you will notice they moved the ball all the time throw our eight midfield, either that's because Sylvinho is a defensive monster, or there was someone in the midfield making a contingency positioning on the left closing that path and drifting the ball to the right, sure we didn't see who, because the ball wasnt there, it was on the right, and there was the cam as well, but can we make a guess?

Watching the game is something, reading the game is something else, specially when we watch it on TV, but thats another big subject so as usual the alert call: Brief Ramzi! Brief...

“A trap in the Shadow” was the article written before the game, and the title tells the first remark, it was a tricky game that snapped and snipped us in the middle of the noisy debates about December games, it was exactly what we warned about, a kick on the knee before the Mini league marathon of December.

Let's give the credit to the Getafe coach for the mental preparation, because you can hear him saying the following to his players before the game:

“You are here to play against the best team in the world, at their home, what do you need more as a motivation? If you lose it's not a shame, if you win then that's something you will be proud of forever, and will tell your children about it and they may not believe you, so make sure to keep a DVD for this game after you earn an honored result! I can see them in that room, Barcelona stars, talking about you playing all defenses and causing no threat, they are thinking how will they start smashing you, but guess what! They don’t know us! We will play like ALI, welcome the punches but aiming all the time for a knock out!”

Were our guys mentally ready for this game? It seems they were not focused and it seemed they were so certain it will be a win at the end of the day, they tried hard for real, but they seemed to have no big motivation to focus from the very first minute, so all were out of system, and out of functions.

Yea…including Guardiola, the man I believe in to manage this team, and I still do with no doubts, but man this game…I don’t care if we won it or lost it, again as I said in the pre-match article, its not a game for any tests and rotations, what happened was obvious:

1) Playing Sylvinho and Alves together: last summer everyone was calling for a new left back to take Abidal place, a new Alves was urgently needed, and I said it then you just cant play two forward backwards at the same time, we tried it already with Gio and Belleti! Abidal (then later Puyol on the left back) created balance with the two central backs when Alves moves forward. What we did in this game was not that we only used two offensive backwards, but also one of them was out of form.

Having Sylvinho meant keeping Puyol and Pique alone at the back, specially when Yaya turned to act more as a midfielder than a defensive midfielder, the team lost depth, and if you watch the goal it wasn’t only and exclusively Pique's fault. In the other hand, playing with this shallow depth made the players feel insecure pushing up and maintaining continuous high pressure on the ball holder, so the Getafe players were able to keep the threat far from their goal and had their time to move the ball and generate counter attacks.

2) I mentioned that Getafe defense is slow and suffers bad positioning, for the first glance they may seems to be really solid in the back, but if you can watch the game again you will notice that every time we played the passing direct game and increased the tempo they got lost, but we didn’t do it that often in the first half, Did anyone noticed how determinant Barcelona players were to go from the middle? Did you notice that dribbling was a priority over passing the ball then feeling in a hurry to move the ball forward ending up playing a wrong pass? I never seen us playing as many wrong passes as we did in this game.

There was not enough width to open Getafe defense and generate our passing engines, Everyone was standing in his place instead of moving and requesting the ball, that’s out of system and it comes with the lack of psychological preparation for the game.

We made things too easy for Getafe defense through heading directly with the ball toward their bodies, and as I said once you need to rotate around the Bus when it’s parked in front of the ball, you just can’t keep crushing yourself on it.

3) How many times did we cross the ball in the first half? Three times, two were bad and one found no one on the far post, again before the game I mentioned that this team – Getafe – weakness is crosses and diagonal passes, and expected that it will be the way we can score.

We started without Henry and that was strange because that’s one of the rare games that fits him perfectly, in the second half we all saw the deference, even though Henry wasn’t really playing as a second striker but still he made his impact!

With Eto'o being the only striker in the box, Bojan and Hleb unactivated and not energetic enough on the flanks, while the midfielders were not orchestrating the moves to force everyone doing their jobs, we need to admit there was no threat in the first half to make getafe worry.

Henry beside Eto'o in the box was crucial to push Getafe back to their box instead of giving them the chance to pressure us in the midfield, that was the turning point.

And guys! Mainly Alves, Keita and Yaya, where the h****, are the long range shots?!

More crosses and playing on the flanks was the most important change between the first half and the second, besides passing the ball better, the goal was a carbon to a goal I posted in that article and I demanded more of that copy. We had to start the game the way we finished it, then we would have been able to finish it as we expected before it started!


Off record:

Can we win without Messi?
My answer is straight forward, definitely we can! If we discovered during the season that we cant then, pep and co has a big problem, or even pep and co ARE our big problem, which is not the case, not as I see it anyway. The strength of any team come from the quality of the squad and the quality of the coaching staff together, the era of being only dependent on the quality of some players in the squad ended and will never return, it happened once when we had exceptional talents and the other teams were in a mess, now things are different, when the important players are missed then the quality of the coaching staff find the opportunity to show its metal. So lets not get confused by the common stereotypes we read in the media, we have enough quality to overcome any challenges and no excuses allowed.

Why do I think Yaya's first half was not perfect?
Actually I raise this issue because it was the subject of the chat between the two halves on the blog chat application. What we try to do here is to go more in depth than taking the one dimensional scale. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, but we will keep trying the best we can and we know. Yaya was, is, and will always be the tank in the midfield, no one can doubt that but is that all what needed? I know this is not going to be neither popular nor entertaining…

Football is a different and more complicated game than lot of other sports, in some sports, you have a player who is a criminal and his role is to stop the other team move, then you have the one with pace, the one who kick, the one who shoot, who rebound and so…I am not experienced in other sports so if that true then I know that’s not in football.

As for Yaya, in the first half he intercepted lot of balls, and made his physical impact, but he also did something that’s against the basic concepts of the game. As a defensive midfielder, and when u play in a game like the one we watched last night, you are not allowed to take the ball in the midfield, step over the midfielders of your team, and head with the ball directly in the traffic, because you cause more anonymous damage than the goods you may think you are adding throw doing that.

Some examples of side effects? The team width shrink, the midfielders shatter and move out of position and out of sense (Xavi@first half?), the wingers turn unemployed, the strikers get confused, the defense panic and feel like moving naked with no security, and the opponent feel if they can only get that ball then it will be easy for them to generate a counter attack, specially (again) when the fullbacks of your team move forward together.

I am not saying you can't move forward, but you do so while you are moving in a space, and that will be understood by the midfielders so one of them switch positions with you, but not jumping with the ball in the crowd where your midfielders barely find a space to step, even if the game go bad, DM -the same as CB- cannot just decide to take it on his own swallowing the ball and running forward.

In the second half I can say he was the player I like, he passed the ball all the time to the left and the right, I think the coach had that talk with him, and his respond helped in improving the group dynamics.

One thing missed, Pep is still not doing that tactical trick I suggested once, when things get chained, Yaya and Keita must switch positions so Yaya penetrate to the box and the team cross the ball to take advantage of his physical presence in the box, he will not only have a chance to head the ball to the net, but also through this move he can confuse the defense and open more spaces for his team mates, I hope to see that happening one day.



I tried in this article to discuss the game from another prospect rather than what you may read in most of the football sites, and intentionally I didn't evaluate any specific player in the game because players stocks are going up and down per game for now, I prefer to wait till at least end of December to evaluate the summer transfers made - because fans evaluate the transfer through the players performance per game, so I will not go in more detailed analysis. So I keep it as short as possible - I know, too late.

This is not an article to criticize the team, and my confidence and moral are still unshaken. We need to understand that this is a long season and we will Draw and lose as well as we will win, but even the defeats could be turned profitable if we learn our lessons.

I hope we celebrate guaranteeing the top of our Champions League group this week!

Ramzi Tanani